Monday, November 25, 2013

Revealing as Metaphor


Recently the world has been revealing itself to me metaphorically. The bird is not a bird it is a representation of something more, it is a sign orienting my thoughts and actions in a certain direction. Each waking moment is slowly becoming more like a dream, in which I interpret the physical reality before me by association with stories, myths, previous experiences and the complex web of attitudes that form my belief structure. This interpretation of the world is not intentional. It is as if the world is speaking to me.
The world is never what it seems. This thesis has been confirmed repeatedly throughout history as new paradigms have been accepted. My personal experience has led me to accept a new paradigm and thus a new worldview. It is beyond the merely theoretical, it has literally changed the way I “see” reality. Understanding, and seeing the world entirely metaphorically requires and openness to an infinite range of possible meanings of symbols placed before the observer. The conceptual framework excludes no possibilities, but is shaped by prior experiences. The task is to take an inventory of these past experiences and detach yourself from them to a degree that excludes them from your conceptual framework. This detachment does not abandon them from your mind. It only relegates them to the unconscious.
Once we begin to cleanse this conceptual framework, new associations of meaning are formed when signs and symbols are presented to us. The unconscious is opened to a greater degree in order to assign meaning to things. The conscious mind operates to accept or deny such and such a meaning. I submit that there are inherent value assignments in the acceptance of certain meanings. Since value assignments are intuitive judgments, and not derived reasons (this point is highly contentious), we then have a new intuitive way of coming to know reality.

When we come to know reality in a way essentially linked with value assignments and unconscious operations exuding meaning on symbols, much of our reasonable deliberation becomes obsolete. Daily life becomes a dance of silence, it becomes an activity of the mind observing, listening and waiting for direction as to what to do next. The willful choices one has become more about what value to assign to certain interpretations of symbols, than about what actions to take, because as metaphor exudes itself upon the observer, you are guided to and from certain patterns of action. 
This is a challenging thing to write about because it is fundamentally different mode of conscious understanding of reality. Currently this new mode is vague to me, it has been exciting and scary to enter in to. But it is providing insights I never thought possible, and presenting opportunities of courses of action which are on the whole more beneficial than before. From my experience this shift in understanding requires some degree of trust in the automatic metaphorical interpretations presented, this trust is hard to exercise, but nonetheless produces some fascinating results.

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